Software Releases

Office 2016 for Mac – A plea for add-ins functionality!

With the release today of the first preview of Office 2016 for Mac (which has been a LONG LONG time coming as you will all know), I want to put forward the following plea to Microsoft. Thus far, on brief inspection, I have not seen any indications that add-ins will be supported in the new version of Outlook, or the rest of Office.

As many of you will know this has been something that is sorely lacking from the Mac version and therefore when vendor’s offer Outlook plugins (the ones that I personally would like to use the most), we Mac users get left high and dry.

Therefore I ask that everyone click the little smiley in the preview version of Office for Mac (top right hand corner) and echo this plea for Microsoft to include such functionality in the new release.

The feedback I left was along the following lines (I will admit this is a cleaner version as I lost the copy-paste version I took to post here):

Hi Team,One thing that I have not seen thus far in the preview, on initial inspection, is the lack of any add-ins functionality like the Windows version of Office has had for many years. When I think of useful add-ins I think of those from vendors such as Evernote, Bananatag, Any of the anti-spam software companies all the way up to enterprise level add-ins for interacting with email archiving appliances and enterprise anti-spam solutions.

With the complete overhaul that is being worked on so diligently by Microsoft, I feel it is essential that focus is given to allowing vendors to extend the functionality of Outlook (as the highest priority) and the remaining Office applications as a secondary component.

While we are many months away from release I think this is the best time to raise this and I hope Microsoft will hear our pleas to provide a feature comparable version to that of Microsoft Windows users.

Kind Regards,Stuart

Let me know what your thoughts are, and if you send Microsoft some feedback, please leave a comment here and let me know.

Cheers, Stuart

Dell Releases Firmware Update for Seagate ST9500420ASG

Since I purchased my Dell M4400 Precision Mobile Workstation around 5 months ago, I have been facing an issue where the included Seagate 500GB hard drive (ST9500420ASG) was clicking regularly which in turn caused the operating system and computer to pause (almost like stalling) for a period between one and one and a half seconds before returning to normal. Apparently this same drive has caused many issues for owners of Apple systems and Dell Systems alike.

After many a phone call to Dell and some extensive testing, Dell finally admitted there was a problem and escalated my call to Level 2 Devs. Needless to say after a long and painful experience Dell owners can now be free of the clicking on their Seagate ST9500420ASG model drives.

Out of curiosity it looks like it was due to something with the g-shock sensor as it was essentially parking the drive heads to protect the drive thinking it was in a free fall even when this was obviously not the case.

You can get the patch which supports the following seagate models from the dell support site:80G – ST980412ASG 160G – ST9160412ASG 250G – ST9250410ASG 320G – ST9320423ASG 500G – ST9500420ASG (referenced directly from the Dell Website)

As with everything, do a firmware upgrade at your own risk and ensure you have a backup (that you know will restore successfully) in case of failure.

I look forward to hearing if this fixes the issue for you as it has seemed to work perfectly for me.